Absent Without Leave
by LittleBlondeGoth
Summary: One-shot. A member of the Turks has disappeared on a mission; Veld wonders why.


_A/N: Lately, a different kind of pre-game Vincent has been rolling around in my head. He's not a nice guy. In fact, he's about as far from nice as a guy can get. This one-shot was inspired by some other stories on , in particular a series of shorts by Verdot. They got me thinking: Vincent and Veld. If they worked together, what was the fallout from the Nibelheim mission?_

_This isn't a Vincent/Veld story in the yaoi sense. the relationship between the pair is strictly professional. Instead, it's a bit of a ramble about a different (for me, anyway) Vincent._

oOo

A man in Velds rather lofty position was used to getting answers, not excuses. He'd tried going through all the proper channels. He'd tried asking nicely. In the past couple of weeks he'd even put aside his strict adherence to procedure and resorted to outright bullying and brutality. But every time he followed up an avenue of investigation, he'd end up slamming face first into a stone wall of silence. The President wasn't happy; it followed therefore that neither was Veld.

Reports coming out of Nibelheim were sketchy at best. Things had been… progressing, for want of a better term, then out of nowhere everything just stopped and no-one would talk to him anymore. Veld wasn't used to that, either.

He fixed the three people in front of him with a steely glare the criminal underworld had learned to fear, yet they remained resolutely tight lipped and refused to answer his questions. But then, photographs seldom talked back.

Gast: Missing. Crescent: Missing. Valentine: Missing. And in Velds experience, people didn't just vanish off the face of the earth. Not unless he'd had something to do with it personally, anyway.

Gast, Crescent and Valentine: Two very important scientists and, of more concern to Veld at this particular moment in time, one Turk. And not just any Turk, either. No, that would be too easy. It just _had_ to be Valentine, didn't it? Even a continent away, he could always be relied upon to make Velds life as difficult as possible.

Veld had speculated, once in the reasonably distant past, that if the Turks hadn't already existed when Valentine was recruited, someone would have had to have made them up specifically for him.

He was simply far too unpredictable to be a grunt in Shinra's standing army. That's where he'd been originally, when Velds predecessor had spotted him; he'd stuck out a mile, even then. Not least of all for being the only child of lauded Shinra scientist Grimoire Valentine. Eighteen years of age, and that kid could have had his pick of any cushy desk job in the Company that he'd wanted. Instead, he'd signed on to be a lowly soldier. Veld often wondered about that. The army was where people ended up who had no other real prospects; people too unskilled to do much other than point and shoot vaguely in the direction they were told. Valentine himself never spoke about it, and propriety was so ingrained into his superior that he'd never pushed the issue. But in Velds mind, it held all the hallmarks of a teenager doing his damnedest to piss off his parents.

It must have worked. Veld had never seen Grimoire mention or enquire about his son, even though they worked in the same building. And the kid behaved as if he had no family whatsoever, never speaking of them or acknowledging their existence. Veld could only hazard a guess at what caused the bad blood. Hah, youthful rebellion and then some.

That had to be it, because there was no way in hell Valentine was cut out for the army. Oh, the kid could shoot – _boy_, could he shoot – but he really did not take well to the concept of 'rank'. Or, more crucially, 'orders'.

Lassiter, the previous leader of the Turks, had always kept an eye on the new drafts just on the off chance there was something there he thought he could use. He'd seen something special in the obnoxious teen, something he felt could be moulded into Turk material, and hauled him away from the military by the scruff of his neck. Which in retrospect was probably best for all concerned, considering Valentine had been holding his gun to another recruits' head at the time. No, definitely not cut out for a life in the rank and file.

Somehow Valentine had gone on to become simultaneously the most problematic member of the team, but also the best Turk anyone had seen in years.

Unfortunately, Lassiter had been killed on assignment not long after Valentine put on the suit. That sudden vacuum left Veld to take over not only leadership of the elite group, but also the training of someone he could only begin to describe as "deranged". And that was just the tip of the iceberg of adjectives he had at his disposal.

Initially he'd thought to instil some well needed discipline by showing the kid up in front of the others, but even that simplest of plans had backfired spectacularly. Instead of being caught unawares and at a loss when seemingly not paying attention during a mission briefing, he'd instead repeated Veld's own words back at him practically verbatim, complete with exaggerated emphasis, all delivered in an extremely bored sounding monotone. It would have been funny, had it happened to anyone else.

A while ago, Veld had heard one of the science bods talking about how the human brain was like a computer, with electric signals fizzing along mental pathways just like data. He hadn't paid it much heed at the time, but later when he thought about it, the comparison really wasn't a bad one. If they were right though, something had definitely gone wrong when Valentine's brain computer had been put together. Some of the bits must have been wired up incorrectly, because something was definitely… wrong.

Oh, the kid seemed to operate. He walked, talked and clearly wasn't stupid, in spite of holding the man next to him at gunpoint on his second day in the army. Veld had even managed, through extensive time and patience (at least on his side), to teach him a thin veneer of politeness. However he also had a unmitigated capacity for creative violence that left most people speechless. Or dead. That happened a lot too.

But no matter how good Velds efforts, the kid never lost that inner rage. In fact, this made the new politeness scarier than when he flipped out, because at least you knew where you stood when someone had you pinned to the wall by the throat and the barrel of a 9mm jammed in your eye. It might not be a great place to stand, but you had something to work with as a starting point. Polite Valentine was worse than Pissed Valentine because it was a phase that was never going to last; it was only a matter of time before the walls got painted red, but you didn't know _when_ it was going to happen. That foreknowledge set you on edge, which only made it more likely you'd slip up and piss him off enough so he'd flip…

The trouble was that you could never predict quite how he was going to react to anything. Example. A group of Turks had been hanging round a bar in the lower sectors one evening, when a guy with a death wish decided to crack Valentine over the skull with a chair. For once Valentine was blameless - he hadn't been antagonising the man, just unlucky to be nearest to someone who thought they had something to prove. Even Veld had his hand halfway to his sidearm before he'd realised it, moving to forestall the inevitable fallout as the kid reeled from the blow – it was testament to his training that he was even still standing. That or too damn thick-skulled to know when to go down. But in defiance of all the known laws of nature, Valentine had burst out laughing, clapped the fellow on the back and bought him drinks for the remainder of the night. The rest of the Turks looked on, completely baffled as to what had just transpired, but pleased that at least they hadn't been blacklisted from yet another drinking hole.

Of course, two weeks later someone found the guy leaking brain matter in an alleyway, and it didn't take a huge leap of deduction to quickly put two and two together. When approached, Valentine hadn't even bothered to deny it, he'd simply shrugged and replied that "it wasn't funny anymore" as if that explained everything. Worryingly, in a way it did.

Perhaps unfortunately for Velds sanity, old man Shinra had a particular fondness for the kids' brand of homicidal mayhem, and started requesting him for jobs where he wanted to, in his own words, 'send a message'. Turns out, a reputation like Valentines spreads faster than wildfire in certain circles.

How he'd snuck through the initial psych screening was still something of a mystery. Veld wasn't a betting man, but if he had been he'd put his life savings on Valentine having cheated his way round it. Was it even _possible_ to cheat a psychiatric evaluation? It must be, because somehow the kid had done it. The test was designed to flag up people exactly like him, yet he'd sailed through with a near perfect score. It was only after the young Turk had been sent on a routine pickup mission and ended up killing over a dozen men, that Veld had hauled him back in front of the shrink.

It was still a sore point that it took until the third time this happened before anyone clicked all was not as it should be inside the kids head.

Odin alone knew where any of this came from. There was an old proverb about the apple never falling far from the tree, but in this case Veld had his doubts. This apple had fallen, rolled down the hill and into a river before bobbling along and coming ashore a good few miles upstream. Where someone had taken a bite out of it. A somewhat tortured analogy perhaps, but it was the best he could come up with. He'd met Grimoire Valentine a few times over the course of his years in Shinra Manufacturing, and the man struck him as being urbane, calm and thoughtful; traits he would be hard pressed to apply to the son. Certainly the two bore a physical resemblance that was undeniable. Both had similar features, but whilst the Doctors were aged with wisdom and understanding, Valentine juniors were etched in arrogance.

That was the thing though, Valentine wasn't just a Turk, he was an unassailable wall of self-assurance. He walked into all situations with the absolute belief that everything would go his way and that he'd be walking out again, and incredibly he always managed to pull it off.

Still, Veld couldn't shake the feeling that it was a fortress built in glass – one good kick would bring the whole thing tumbling down. Some part of Valentine's psyche had to be held together with spit and duct tape, and he really didn't want to be around if that façade ever started to unravel.

But when push came to shove, you couldn't deny his natural ability for the job. Valentine worked best with a loose mission brief. It wasn't that he couldn't understand complicated strategy; far from it, the kid possessed one of the best tactical brains Veld had ever seen. It was just that he didn't understand the point of it when he could do it all his own, out-of-the-box way. No, much better to simply give him an objective, point him in the right direction, then stand back and wait for the fireworks. Often literally.

Veld wished he were joking, but as it often seemed to, fortune conspired against him. A case in point would be the situation last year at Reactor 2. He'd sent three of his men in to deal with a terrorist threat - some new splinter group breaking in, stealing corporate information, schematics and the like, and damaging valuable company property. Somehow though they'd been caught on the hop, and found themselves greatly outnumbered with their backs to the wall. Veld had no choice but to send in some backup.

Backup came in the form of a six foot, skinny-ass punk, with a briefcase full of plastic explosive and no respect for proper procedure. Still, technically speaking the mission was salvaged, the data recovered and the perpetrators identified. Or at least, they were once the corpses had been reunited with their respective heads. Veld cradled his own in his hands. And this was the Turk he'd sent to oversee the science project in Nibelheim.

First and foremost, it was punishment for crossing the line during the Mako Reactor incident. And not so much crossing it, more forming up a parade and conga-lining over it with an over-abundance of C4. As far as Valentine was concerned, the line was a hazy speck far back on the horizon. Veld, on the other hand, was a firm believer in the Line; so much so that you could hear the implied capital letter whenever he spoke of it. For him, it marked the difference between Turks and common criminals; the thugs, thieves and murderers they often interacted with. Stepping over that line was an offence worthy of rebuke in his book, and quite frankly one particular Turk had been dancing off in the distance for long enough. Bodyguard duty in a backwater village was about as far from Valentine's preferred _modus operandi_ as it was possible to get, so when the job landed on Velds desk there was little hesitation over who it was going to be assigned to.

But Veld had gone through all the details, and there was also the underlying fact that this mission had the words "freaky shit" emblazoned all over it. And much as he hated to admit it, no-one was quite as adept at dealing with freaky shit than Valentine. That ability to improvise which frustrated him no end under normal circumstances would prove invaluable should the Project start heading south. And if things came to a head, there was no-one else Veld would trust quite as much to keep a lid firmly on the situation, even if it meant the amount of casualties would number in the 'everyones'.

Valentine had been pissed off about the assignment – when Veld had initially briefed him, the temperature in the room had lowered to such an extent it put Shiva to shame – but for once in the kids life he'd kept his damn mouth shut and done what he was told to do. Mercifully he seemed to have realised there would be a price to pay for the reactor stunt and chosen to take it like a man. Besides, all things being equal, Veld didn't plan to keep him there for the entire duration of the Project, just long enough for him to cool his heels to get everything bedded in. Hard to admit again, but unless Nibelheim took a drastic nosedive and any of that freaky shit started to materialise, Valentines skills would be needed more back here than they would in the arse end of nowhere.

Things had started to take a turn for the weird a couple of months in. Valentine had been sending regular reports as instructed, with nothing out of the ordinary to ring any alarm bells. Veld was pleased - his initial misgivings over the Project appeared to have been without foundation, and it was shaping up to be just another bland security detail, all proceeding to plan. Valentine himself had been behaving within standard Turk operational parameters and there'd been no bar fights, shootings or explosions for the duration of his stay in Nibelheim. Veld was doubly satisfied in fact, because while the kid hadn't been causing problems over there, he hadn't been causing them around Veld either. It had been a blessedly quiet few months all round.

Too quiet to last, naturally.

The first sign of something out of the ordinary was when around three months in, he'd decided to recall the kid to Midgar having learned his lessons, replacing him with someone more suited to the onerous duty. Valentine refused. Flat out, point blank turned him down. That set Veld firmly on the back foot, since not only was he unaccustomed to having his direct orders questioned, but he'd been utterly convinced Valentine would be on the first plane out of that two-gil fleapit village before Veld had hung up the PHS.

But no. Valentine had replied that now he was here he'd see the mission through, like he ought to. He'd got a handle on the Project specifics, so anyone replacing him would have to waste time getting up to speed. All good, sensible, considered answers that Veld himself would have been proud to give to a superior. Which is precisely why he was worried, because they'd come out of Valentine instead.

He'd immediately suspected some kind of ulterior motive, but for the life of him he couldn't work out what that motive could be. There was no fighting going on, no chances to play with explosives – Valentine was a man of action and there was none to be had here. It was just a small group of scientists conducting experiments.

Perhaps that was it? His father was a scientist, so maybe the kid had some hidden interest in the field? From the weekly reports he'd been sending on the overall progress of the project, Valentine certainly appeared to get the gist of what they were doing over there, likely better than Veld himself did. He'd obviously got some of Grimoire in him, even if it was buried deep. But was that enough of a reason for him to say he was happy with his posting?

Veld doubted it, but in the absence of anything better he'd decided to let this one play out. Valentine was allowed to continue his mission in Nibelheim, as long as he kept his superior in the loop and the scientists placated. Surprisingly, the kid had even seemed pleased by this. The leader of the Turks couldn't shake some kind of nagging feeling about the whole thing, since "happy" and "pleased" were not two words he tended to associate with Valentine. But in the great scheme of things, everything was working as intended, so Veld opted to maintain the status quo.

But of course the happy state of affairs didn't last long either.

Another few months down the line, and Valentines weekly missives started to change tone. The project was evolving, from tests on animals to tests on a human subject, and though he never came out and said it directly, Veld could tell the kid didn't approve. It was a very strange form of irony, in Velds' eyes. Valentine could quite cheerfully slaughter a dozen people without so much as blinking or breaking a sweat, but when confronted by scientists, syringes and cells he started developing morals?

Alright, so on paper the project was starting to look a little… unusual. Apparently the tests with Jenova genetic material had been so successful, they were going to attempt bonding it _in utero_. Veld had read through the last few updates with increasing feelings of unease, wondering if those first signs of freaky shit were starting to manifest themselves, but everything had been fully sanctioned by the science team and the President himself. In fact, Shinra was pushing for the project to pick up even more speed. These experiments would herald the dawning of a new age, he'd said. It was creating hybrids of human and Ancient, bringing back a lost race and pushing the boundaries of human evolution.

It all sounded a bit too much like playing Gods to Veld, but it wasn't his place to question the contents of the project, just to ensure its continual security. And this was the message he relayed back to Valentine, who took it about as well as could be expected. Their conversations degenerated into Valentine behaving like a petulant teenager, giving only one word answers whenever he could get away with it. He was completely transparent about the project, but years of being a Turk told Veld the kid was keeping something back. Still, whilst he couldn't shake his unease, nothing had really gone wrong per se (aside from Valentines attitude), so the project rumbled on towards completion.

But these last few weeks, shit had really hit the proverbial fan.

The last official report that landed on his desk contained nothing unusual, at least as far as "unusual" could be defined in relation to the Jenova Project. But seven days later, no new update was forthcoming. This breach of protocol was unacceptable in Velds eyes, so he attempted to contact his Turk to demand an explanation for the lax behaviour. There was no answer, as Valentine wouldn't pick up his PHS. Veld decided to get answers from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and asked Professor Gast what the hell was going on. Or he would have, if Gast hadn't disappeared as well. In fact, Veld had no luck raising _any_ of the project team, be they Turk or scientist.

Evidently if he wanted a job done properly, he'd have to do it himself. Incensed, he charted one of Shinras helicopters to fly him directly to Nibelheim, where he could assess the situation personally. Upon his arrival at the Shinra mansion, he didn't find the hive of activity he'd been expecting. Instead, the place was deserted. All the lab equipment was in place, and most of the occupants' belongings were still there, but of the occupants themselves there was no sign.

Alarm bells sounded furiously in his skull. Exploring the basement laboratory for answers, he'd dug a bullet out of a wall that looks suspiciously like it came from one of Valentines guns. Questioning of the townspeople had revealed nothing - they seemed to have left the manor house well enough alone, wary of anything related to Shinra. He couldn't really blame them for that, but their reticence didn't help him fill in any of the murky picture. Veld was on the verge of ordering a full scale search of the entire town when a call came in from Midgar to tell him that Doctor Hojo from the project had returned to headquarters.

But even that ray of hope had been snuffed out. Hojo was indeed back in the Shinra fold, but he wasn't talking. He claimed not to know what had happened to the rest of the team. Nor did he seem to care. All he was focused on was the child – the product of the project. Veld had gone after the man aggressively, demanding to know where Valentine was, but Hojo remained close mouthed. "What that fool boy does is none of my concern" he'd snapped.

It was very much Velds concern though, and he'd said as much to the President. But for once, Veld found himself on the wrong side of _that_ argument as well. Old man Shinra showed remarkable disregard for any of the disappearances, denying Velds request for an investigation. Just like Hojo, he only seemed to care about the baby they were starting to call "Sephiroth". He was warned to leave the Doctor alone.

What in the name of all that was holy had gone on in Nibelheim?

His first thought had been that Valentine simply killed the scientists. His second thought wasn't to wonder why he'd do it, but instead why, out of everyone, he'd have left Hojo alive. If protecting a bunch of eggheads hadn't been punishment enough for past transgressions, lumping him with Doctor Hojo was the icing on the cake. Veld couldn't remember meeting a more unctuous, irritating and repellent little man – and Veld had grown up in Midgar, so that was saying something. No, if Valentine was going to go stir crazy and start indiscriminately shooting, Hojo would have been a prime target. So it had to be something else.

He stared down at the three photographs arrayed on his desk. Valentine. Professor Gast, pre-eminent scientist of his age. And poor Dr Crescent, so young and pretty, she didn't deserve to… to… Oh no. No, no, no. That couldn't be it, could it? Was it really that simple? Veld's hand tightened into a fist. He wouldn't have gone and done something stupid over a… He shook his head to clear it. No. Idiotic notion. Men like Valentine didn't lose it because of a pretty face. Odin alone knew how many pretty faces the kid had put a bullet through in his time.

Valentine was trouble with a capital T, but to go completely off grid was out of character even for him. Veld swore he'd get to the bottom of this. He just had to work it out.

oOo

Deep beneath the Shinra mansion, in a room hidden away from prying eyes, locked inside his own tomb, the sleeper lived his nightmare.


End file.
